The Lawfare Podcast

Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of DistrictCon, joins Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss her recently released report "Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace." They discuss the offensive cyber industry, the private sector and individual players, and the government procur...

In a live conversation on July 3, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss updates in the civil and criminal cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a D.C. district court judge's injunction against the Trump administration’s invasion proclamation, attacks on law firms, and more.

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From February 16, 2024: The EU has finally agreed to its AI Act. Despite the political agreement reached in December 2023, some nations maintained some reservations about the text, making it uncertain whether there was a final agreement or not. They recently reached an agreement on the technical text, moving the process closer to a successful conclusion. The challenge now will be effective implementation.

To discuss the act and its ...

From November 7, 2023: You probably already know that Rep. Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House. What you may not know is that every single one of the issues on his plate is a national security issue, at least in the short term. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds to talk it all through. They talked about Israel aid, Ukrai...

Teun Jansenn is a staff member at the European Parliament who works on issues of EU expansion and support for Ukraine. He joined Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to talk about the prospects of Europe's stepping up for Ukraine as the United States backs away. He also talked about why EU enlargement is essential to getting EU governance under control and the role that Ukraine might play in that process.

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For today's episode, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman interviews Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the Naval War College and Columbia University, to discuss the Trump administration's handling of the U.S. military. Cohn discusses the firings of senior military officials, military parades, and the use of the U.S. military at the U.S-Mexico border and in Los Angeles. She also assesses which policies are...

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Lindsay Freeman, Director of Technology, Law & Policy at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law, to discuss her recent Lawfare article, “War Crimes for Fun and Profit.” They talk about how and why so-called war influencers linked to private military companies such as the Wagner Group in the Sahel are posting “...

In a live conversation on June 27, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case, the whistleblower complaint about Emil Bove’s actions as deputy attorney general, the disbarment of Kenneth Chesebro...

From March 19, 2020: What can the president do in a national emergency? What limits what the president can do? What authorizes the president to do all those things he can do in a national emergency? Is the president abusing, misusing, using appropriately, or under-using emergency powers during the coronavirus crisis? And what are the logical end points for how far this could go? For this bonus edition, Benjamin Wittes got on the ph...

From December 5, 2015: The show this week features Natan Sachs, a Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, who recently published an article in Foreign Affairs on anti-solutionism as strategy in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

During his conversation with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Ben Wittes, Sachs argues that the apparent absence of a long-term strategy on the Israeli Right for dealing ...

Lawfare Legal Fellow Mykhailo Soldatenko sits down with Eric Ciaramella, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Samuel Charap, Senior Political Scientist at Rand Corporation, to discuss the key issues in the Ukraine-Russia talks. They chat about the national interests of the interested parties, whether a negotiated settlement is possible, and what form a potential agreement may take. They als...

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Benjamin Wittes and Natalie Orpett, and University of Virginia School of Law professor Ashley Deeks, to talk through the week’s big national security news, including:

• “Bracing for Fallout.” In a surprise move, President Trump joined Israel’s military campaign against Iran over the weekend, using a specialized U.S. ordinance to hit Iranian nuclear sites that were beyond Israel...

Max Smeets, Co-Director of Virtual Routes and Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, joins Lawfare’s Jonathan Cedarbaum and Justin Sherman to discuss his recently released book “Ransom War: How Cybercrime Became a Threat to National Security.” They discuss the history of ransomware (including the term itself), how the threats have evolved over the years, and some of the major drivers of innovation and entrepreneurialism within the r...

In the wake of controversy over OpenAI’s restrictive nondisclosure agreements, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced the AI Whistleblower Protection Act. In this episode, Lawfare Research Director Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Charlie Bullock, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI and co-author of a new Lawfare article on the bill, about its key provisions. They discuss why this bill is an importa...

In a live conversation on June 23, Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke to Lawfare Senior Editor Scott Anderson, Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor and CSIS fellow Daniel Byman, and Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution Suzanne Maloney about the American attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, what the reaction within Iran has been, whether the strikes were legal unde...

In a live conversation on June 20, Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett sat down with Lawfare Legal Fellow James Pearce and Lawfare Senior Editors Anna Bower, Scott Anderson, and Roger Parloff to discuss the litigation over President Trump federalizing the California National Guard to send them to L.A., the the order for the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Supreme Court denying an applicati...

From July 14, 2023: The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, just wrapped up, and the big news is that Sweden is in, and Ukraine is not. Eric Adamson of the Atlantic Council and the Swedish Defense Association is a Swedish defense policy analyst who observed the NATO summit.

He joined Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes to discuss the two big things that happened: the Swedish resolution of the dispute with Turkey that im...

From May 9, 2023: Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a state of exception as its President Nayib Bukele seeks to crack down on the country’s powerful gangs. Bukele, who once described himself on Twitter as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has engaged in a prolonged attack on El Salvador’s democratic institutions. And the crackdown has resulted in a range of human rights abuses. At the same time, Bukele really does seem to ...

For today’s episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson and Lawfare Senior Editor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Molly Reynolds sat down for a conversation about the rescissions package President Trump recently put forward to Congress, how it relates to the litigation over the president’s attempted cuts to U.S. foreign assistance, and what it all signals about how the administration intends to hand...